I've decided that it is time to begin meting out the final chapter in bite-sized portions. Each portion will be about the length of a 'normal' chapter. I will be posting a new 'portion' each Monday.
I hope the wait was worth it. 
Neil
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BEST BUDDIES PLAY HARD
CONCLUSION - Part 3A
Kevin made his old hometown his home again and never left it. Like me and most of my family, he still lives here. After our chat that night, he moved into my old bedroom in Mom and Dad’s house (at their insistence, of course) until he could get back on his feet and support himself properly. Within a week, he’d found a good, well-paying job with lots of potential for advancement. Still, Mom insisted that he stay with her and Dad for at least a few months until he could save up enough money to head out on his own. He ended up living with them for almost half a year before finding an apartment of his own and telling them that he would be moving out at the end of the month.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. There were a few bumps in the road. Well, more than mere bumps, really. More like crises if you will. The first one threatened to end my friendship with Kevin. The second crisis permanently changed things between me and Sharon and Kevin. The third crisis. . . well, it was more of Mount Everest thing than a bump in the road and it very nearly brought my entire family and our lives crashing to the ground.
Still, we managed to get through it all somehow and came away with only a few bumps and bruises and even a few attitude adjustments here and there. Don’t ask me how. It was a learning experience for all of us and, quite frankly, we’re still learning.
* * * * *
When Kevin was ready to move into his new apartment, he was going to take the bus out west one last time to rent a U-Haul and load it with all his stuff he’d been keeping in storage there and drive it back home. I arranged some holiday time off work so I could drive him there instead and then follow him back home again. It would be a fun adventure, but a long one. Kevin assured me we could drive out in two days and that it would take only a few hours to load the U-Haul truck on the morning of the third day. We would start driving back in the afternoon after the truck was loaded and, barring unexpected breakdowns or other unplanned delays, we expected to make it back home late Friday night or early Saturday morning.
The storage unit Kevin was renting was in a town about an hour’s drive south of where he used to live when he first moved there with his family. A thought crossed my mind as the morning sun chased us down the highway and I asked him about it.
“Is that where you lived when you ran away the first time?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Marty! Just shut the hell up about that, will ya, please!?” Kevin had turned his body toward me and I could feel his anger in the air as well as I could see it on his face. His whole body was tied up in a gigantic muscle knot. “I told you before I would tell you when and if I feel ready to tell you! I’m not, okay!? I hated the place where I went! It was an angry and very lonely time for me when I was there! It scared the living shit out of me and I’ve been trying my damnedest to forget about it and you just keep bringing it back up over and over and over again and I go right back there in my mind and live the whole fuckin’ thing all over again! Please, Marty, just keep your fuckin’ mouth shut about it, okay!? Fuck! Why do you have to be so goddamned nosey all the time!? It’s none of your fuckin’ business where I was or what I did! Fuck!”
And, with that, Kevin spun himself around on the passenger seat again to face the open passenger window, crossed his arms firmly across his chest, and leaned his head against the window frame. I could hear the pounding of my heart even and Kevin’s incensed breathing above the sounds of my car and the traffic and the whistling of the wind blowing through the open windows.
“I’m sorry, Kevin,” I apologised solemnly. “I really am. I won’t ever mention it again. I swear.”
If Kevin heard me, he didn’t let on. I returned my attention to driving and, for the next hour or so, we rode along in absolute silence. Kevin didn’t move and I began to wonder if he had fallen asleep. I became anxious for the rest of our journey. I wasn’t sure if I could handle five days of not talking to each other.
I pulled off the highway after a time to get gas. I parked at the pump and told the attendant to “fill ‘er up”, then asked for the key to the john. “Inside the door,” he said pointing to the office, “on the left.”
“Thanks,” I said to him and left him to fill the tank, check the fluids as they were inclined to do way back then, and wash my windscreen. I retrieved the key from a peg mounted just inside the office door and headed for the bathroom. I had to laugh. The key was securely attached to an old ping pong paddle with half the rubber pad missing - as if anyone would want to try to steal it.
Like most other gas station bathrooms, this one smelt like one, and it had another very familiar smell, too. I stepped up to the only urinal there and discovered one of those all-too-familiar deodorant pucks sitting at the bottom of the porcelain basin coated. I pulled out my dick and let fly, using the deodorant puck as a target. I flushed, washed my hands, and left the small bathroom. The door closed automatically behind me. I saw Kevin standing there at the same time I heard the lock on the door click. “Sorry, Kev,” I said as I held out the key to him. “I didn’t see you.”
“S’okay,” he mumbled as he took the key from me. Without another word, he unlocked the door and disappeared inside.
I returned to the office to pay and bought a couple of cold ginger ales and a chocolate bar for each of us, then went out to wait in the car. Kevin emerged from the bathroom after a few minutes, handed the key with the ping pong paddle attached to the attendant, and climbed back into the car, closing the door with a metallic thud.
I pointed to the ginger ale and candy bar on the seat beside him and told him, “Your treat next time.”
“Okay.”
He’d spoken two words to me, one of which had an ‘S’ attached. I wondered if that meant we were back on speaking terms again. He opened his pop in silence and ripped open the chocolate bar as I drove out of the lot and back onto the highway. We didn’t speak again until his chocolate had been completely eaten and the wrapper had been scrunched mercilessly into a small ball of crinkly paper and tossed out the window.
“Mom used to love it,” Kevin said nostalgically after he had settled back into the passenger seat.
“Love what?” I asked very curiously and genuinely confused.
“The town,” he replied. “Where we’re going. Where the storage unit is. Mom used to love going there whenever she could afford to and she always took me with her. She used to do sewing and knitting on the side to earn some spending money so we could go. She never told Dad she was doing it. It was our little secret. As often as she could afford to, she’d buy us a bus ticket and me and her would go there and have a Sunday afternoon picnic beside the river. She didn’t tell David where we were going, either. She hated the way David always picked on me and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it especially when Dad would beat her up if she mentioned it. Everything was my fault as far as Dad was concerned. He hated me and he’d swat me around every chance he got. If Mom tried to step in and protect me, he’d swat her around, too, and I would scream at her to stay out of it just so he wouldn’t hurt her. He couldn’t hurt me as easily as he could hurt Mom. I was a kid. I could take it.”
He stopped long enough to chug a few swallows of his ginger ale. “My best memories are of there, Marty. At the river. We’d sit under our favourite tree for hours, just sitting and talking and watching the people walking by and having fun, and we’d toss bread crumbs to the ducks and swans on the river. Good times. If the water was warm enough, I’d go for a swim while Mom watched. Sometimes she’d take off her shoes and stockings and wade in with me, but mostly we would just sit there together. She liked to hold me tight and cuddle me and kiss my hair. I liked it, too. It made me feel good. Those were the only times I didn’t regret living out west instead of being back home with you”
Kevin was most certainly on a roll and I let him keep on rolling as long as he wanted to or, at least, as long as he felt he needed to keep rolling. “She’s buried there, Marty,” he continued. “The cemetery’s right beside the river on the other side, just a little ways downstream from our picnic spot. She bought the plot herself from money she’d saved up from sewing and what she could steal from Dad. I think she knew she was dying and wanted to make sure she could rest in one of her favourite places. That’s why I stored my stuff there. I knew I’d be going back at least one more time. Either I’d be picking up my junk and moving back home forever if things worked out between you and me and Sharon, or I’d be moving back there forever just so I could be close to Mom if they didn’t.”
And then he did something which took me completely by surprise. He leaned across the seat, planted his right hand on my upper thigh, and kissed me tenderly on the cheek. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Marty,” he said warmly. “I hate being mad at you.”
“S’okay,” I replied stupidly. “I guess I deserved it.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I was just so happy we were talking again.
Oh, if you think that was our first crisis, you would be wrong. That was nothing compared to what was to come.
We took turns driving, swapping places every few hours or so. We talked about a whole lot of stuff, but, besides the single most forbidden topic, the one other thing we didn’t talk about was sex. In fact, since Kevin had ultimately decided he would be moving back home, that peck on the cheek was our first hint at intimacy and I truly didn’t know why. I tried several times to broach the subject, but I always chickened out. I guess I resigned myself to the fact that nothing was going to happen during the trip.
Traffic was good so we kept going. After almost fifteen hours on the road, we stopped at a small Mom ‘n Pop motel just off the main highway and rented a room with two double beds. I remember the motel was named after a bird but I can’t for the life of me remember which bird. The motel was L-shaped with the long arm of the ‘L’ running lengthwise alongside the road. We got the last room on the short stick of the ‘L’ closest to the road. There was a car parked in the second unit away from us and lights were shining through the closed drapes. The unit next to us was empty.
The room was what my mom would call ‘quaint’. The textured wallpaper was nice and suitably gender neutral. It was warm and welcoming despite the fact that the bright, flashing neon ‘Vacancies’ sign out near the road in front of the office buzzed louder than the equipment in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab and it lit up the room until we pulled the curtains closed. They were suitably thick so that we barely even noticed it. Besides, after fifteen hours of driving, we were both exhausted and, after a quick shower, I expected both of us would fall into bed and go right to sleep. Both the beds were surprisingly clean and looked suitably comfy but, to be perfectly frank, I don’t think either of us would have been too concerned how comfortable they were. I know I was tired enough that I would have been quite content to sleep on the floor if that’s where I happened to fall down.
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, there was no talk of sex during our entire first day of driving and I don’t think either of us expected anything to happen that night. It just did, and when it did, we found ourselves coming face-to-face with our first crisis.
I suggested that we could shower together but Kevin said that he didn’t think it would be such a good idea. I was rather disappointed but I let suggestion drop. We flipped a coin to see who would go first. I won. With the door closed, the bathroom kind of reminded me of the one in the Bates Motel in the Hitchcock movie
Psycho. The shower tub even had a thick, plastic shower curtain which was suspended from a shiny metal shower rod. The shower hooks were even shaped like light bulbs as they were in the movie. The facilities were so sparkly clean that I almost hated to take a piss in the toilet and wash my hands in the sink. But I did anyway.
As I stood there holding my dick and feeling the piss flowing through it and listening to it splash in the toilet, I had a flash vision of Kevin ripping back the shower curtain while I was standing there under the showerhead. He was dressed in a granny dress and wearing a grey-haired wig that was tied back in a tight bun. He was brandishing a huge butcher knife over his head - a knife suitable for skinning and deboning a moose - and slashing it up and down and making the sounds of screeching violins with a high-pitched “Weeee! Weeee! Weeee! Weeee!”
I chuckled to myself as I finished whizzing, flushed the john, and washed my hands. The towels and wash cloths were nice and soft and fluffy and there was a faint lemon-fresh scent in them. I adjusted the taps to set the water temperature and pressure before stripping off my clothes and dropping them in a pile on the floor near the sink. I flipped the chrome lever which diverted the water from the faucet to the showerhead and stepped into the tub. I noticed that the innkeepers had installed a number of those non-slip rubber flowers in the bottom of the bathtub. I pulled the plastic curtain across the metal bar and closed myself off from the rest of the bathroom.
I was standing there a few minutes later with my face turned upward into the refreshing spray and my eyes closed, letting the hot water splash over my skin, off my chin, and down my body. It felt heavenly and I lost myself in the feel and the sounds of the shower. That’s when I heard the sound of metal on metal as the plastic curtain was being yanked violently open. My eyes jerked open and I turned toward the sound just in time to get a glassful of very cold water square in the middle of my chest. I sucked in my breath in icy shock as Kevin stood there clad only in his well-worn blue jeans, laughing his head off at me.
I stood there facing him, bent slightly forward with my arms spread wide, gasping for breath and trying desperately to regain my composure so I could throttle his ass. Then I began laughing, too. “I’ll get you, you fuckin’ bastard,” I shouted through my laughter as I reached out to grab him.
Kevin backstepped and turned away from me, still laughing his guts out. “You should have seen your face, man! It was priceless!” He started laughing even harder than before. “I wish I’d had a camera!”
I stepped out of the tub with my left foot, grabbing for him again and missing. Kevin, backtracking away from me again, slipped on the small carpet on the floor and had to grab the sink to regain his balance. I took the opportunity and grabbed for the waistband of his jeans. I managed to grab it but Kevin managed to pull himself away from me and turn toward the door. All I got to do was to scrape my nails over his left, denim-covered butt cheek. “Asshole!” I laughed as I clambered the rest of the way out of the tub and scrambled after him.
Kevin peeled out the door, pulling it closed behind him just as I got there. I grabbed the doorknob and tried to turn it but couldn’t. My wet hand simply slid over the slick and shiny metal. I knew it wasn’t locked. The mechanism was on my side of the door which meant that Kevin was holding it closed. I could hear his mocking laughter through the door as he did so.
“Your ass is grass, man!” I shouted at him.
“Oh, yeah!?” he called back as I quickly grabbed a towel off the bar and began wiping my hands dry. “And you think your scrawny little ass is big enough to mow it?”
“Open the door and find out,
pal!” I tried to sound suitably threatening but all I did was to make Kevin snort loudly through his nose.
“Too weak to open it yourself,
pal!?”
My hands felt suitably dry, so I tentatively tested the knob. My grip held. The towel fell to the floor at my feet where I dropped it and slowly but forcefully turned the doorknob clockwise. As I had expected, Kevin countered my move by using equal pressure in the opposite direction. “Ha ha ha ha ha!” he laughed maniacally. “Sucka!!”
But I was ready for him. I widened my stance for balance and gave a mighty and sudden twist in the opposite direction. Kevin wasn’t expecting that and couldn’t counter in time. With a firm wrench of the door, I pulled it open and yanked Kevin right off his feet and he stumbled right into my arms. I wrapped them around him, grasping my wrists firmly in my hands to lock my arms together and successfully pinned Kevin’s arms at his side. I held onto him for dear life, desperate not to allow him to escape now that I had him right where I wanted him.
Kevin laughed and growled and thrashed around, trying to escape my grasp, but my wet, bare skin just slid against his. With his arms bound tightly, his hands couldn’t find purchase. Yet, his thrashing about somehow succeeded in twisting himself around until he was perpendicular to me. I started backtracking, dragging him toward the tub. Kevin’s right side pressed against my chest and I could feel my heart pounding against his biceps and I could feel my cock pressing against the body-warm denim of his jeans. The rough material sent wonderful tingles into the head of my cock as it rubbed against his jeans, but that wasn’t the time for getting horny. It was the time for getting even.
Kevin tried to spread his arms to break my grip when he realised where I was taking him, but I held fast. “No, Marty!” he laughed and began gyrating even harder. “Not with my pants! Not with my pants!!”
His laughs became louder and my energetic grunts and guffaws became more urgent as I heaved backward and lifted my friend clean off his feet. “Marty!” he called again. “
Marty!!” I’m glad the room beside us was empty. Otherwise they would have been pounding on the wall, calling the innkeeper, calling the police, or any or all of those things combined. But we were having fun.
Now, you might be thinking that our antics of that night might have been more suited to a couple of prepubescent boys on a sleepover and you’d probably be right. It was pretty childish and immature. But, at the time, I was feeling more like a twelve-year-old kid than a twenty-something grownup with a wife and a kid of his own who should have known better than to be acting that way. We were kids again, Kevin and I, at least in our minds. We were having the kind of fun that grownups weren’t supposed to have. And we didn’t give a shit, which is the point having fun, isn’t it?
Kevin continued laughing hysterically and shouting out my name, twisting and struggling and kicking his legs in vain to prevent his impromptu dousing, but I was just as determined to make it happen. Our bodies became slick and wet from the showery mist and our own perspiration. It was more difficult to hold on, but I refused to relinquish my hold on him. My laughter was interrupted time and time again by strained grunts of effort as I struggled to manoeuvre my best friend into the tub and under the shower head, and I wouldn’t be happy until I succeeded, and I was determined to succeed.
To that end, I tried to lift Kevin and twist him into the tub, but he wrenched himself in the opposite direction and used his thrashing feet to push himself away from the tub. This effectively spun his body around as well until my bare crotch was pressed against his firm and clenching denim-covered butt cheeks and my hands were clamped over his heaving chest. I was quickly running out of steam, though, and far too busy to think about the fact that my nether regions were now grinding against Kevin’s ample ass.
I paused a moment or two to catch my breath and debate if I should just let him go or try to get that ample ass under the showerhead. In all honesty, even though I really wanted to get him back for drenching me with that glass of cold water, the fact that I would be getting the chance to see his ass in wet, clingy denim was a serious bonus. I decided to take a chance on one final, desperate gambit. I twisted my body to the left, spinning Kevin around until he was facing the adjacent wall instead of the tub and my right leg was pressed against the cool enamel of the tub.
There was a welcomed but brief respite in Kevin’s thrashing as he paused to re-evaluate his situation and I took advantage of it. I lifted my right leg and planted it firmly in the tub before he knew what was happening. He twisted his head around to see and, in his confusion and eased struggling, I pulled my left leg into the tub and into the shower spray, silently thanking the motel owners for the rubber, non-skid daisies they’d placed in the bathtub. Hot water splashed on Kevin’s head and shoulders and the thrashing began anew, but he was laughing too hard for his flailing to be even remotely effective. With Kevin still shouting out my name and throwing in a few choice expletives to boot, I noticed that he was now trying to force his right hand between his ass and my crotch. I thought he was going for my balls so I swiftly backed myself away from the side of the tub and, with one final grunt and heave, pulled Kevin into the tub with me until I was backed against the tiled wall and Kevin was backed against me.
It was only then that I realised that it was the back of Kevin’s hand rubbing against me as he pulled the leather wallet from his back pocket and tossed it to the floor outside the tub. There was a dull thud and then the tinkling sound of scattering coins as they rolled across the tiled floor.
Kevin relented and collapsed against me, still laughing as loudly as ever between his ragged breaths. His chest swelled time and time again against my grasping arms, and my own gasping breaths and laughter pushed my chest into the hot skin of his back. It was over. I had won.
I loosened my grip on him, but I didn’t let him go. In his silence he admitted his defeat. Still, I wanted to make sure he was thoroughly drenched before I released him entirely. His head fell back against my shoulder and his hands came up to cover mine and hold them against his panting chest. We just stood there, laughing and getting wet under the shower spray. It was the closest we had been physically for a very long time, and it felt damned good.
To Be Concluded